I can’t find a nice way to say this. The longer Joe Clark isn’t being held responsible for his ongoing hostility toward people who are trans (or who are marginalized by other intersectional experiences), the longer Toronto continues to be an unsafe place for people like me.

My friends, the ones who are cis, might not need to think about this so much, but that doesn’t make the hazardousness of his behaviour go away. It’s bothersome that Mr. Clark vilifies marginalized people so eagerly. It’s more bothersome how so few of his peers stand up to him and say that it’s etiquette they won’t tolerate in Toronto.

By standing up to Mr. Clark, you are advocating for people like me. You are making Toronto a safer, better place for more people. As you begin to cover for me when I can’t be there, it shows me that you’re somebody who’s concerned with my welfare. You may not be able to call yourself an ally. You may never meet me. But when you stand beside me, you are showing a gesture of goodwill — a selfless act of alliance which never goes unnoticed or unappreciated.

If you’ve never heard of him, Joe Clark is a local person who writes about typefaces, subways, web design, and “gay money” (or “fagonomics”). He is variously described online as a zealot, a gadfly, and a bigot.

Mr. Clark is a man. He’s gay. He’s white. He’s cis. He really dislikes being described as cis:

It’s not clear for whom Mr. Clark is speaking when he says “our” and “us.” I’m sure he can only speak for himself. Maybe a few other cis people agree with him. He might rest better knowing he’s not carrying the burden of speaking for cis people — not even for the cis people in Toronto’s gay and lesbian community.

As cis people go, I don’t want Mr. Clark’s support. It’s not because I think he won’t be a good advocate. It’s that I know he’s incapable of advocating for people whose intersectional life experiences he finds so completely disagreeable. His support is an arsenic.

For several years, I’ve listened to Mr. Clark on the way he pathologizes the experiences of trans people. His attention, sometimes paired with a clinical coldness, can border on the obsessive. He’s disdainful whenever there’s a chance that known trans people could benefit, participate, or are genuinely welcomed.

Mr. Clark’s cissexist behaviour is no less troublesome than when a heterosexual person pathologizes the intersectional experiences of homosexuality. He may beg to differ. In the not-so-distant past, well within Mr. Clark’s own lifetime, this is what used to happen to cis people who were homosexual. He’s aware of this.

Maybe he hopes that people who are trans might one day fade away once cis mental health practitioners agree that being trans is not a mental illness. Maybe Mr. Clark thinks that nobody will “want” to be trans anymore. Honestly, I don’t know what goes through his mind, but I can tell it isn’t a very happy place. It’s a place of spite.

Whenever Mr. Clark brings up people who are trans, nearly everything he says about them is toxic, paranoid, and contemptuous. It’s in stark contrast to his positive work on public transportation signage and accessibility. Mel Gibson’s a very talented actor.

It’s seldom when Mr. Clark passes on challenging the agency of trans women and trans men, even when the topics have nothing to do with any of his own intersectional life experiences. For example, he remarked on the announcement of a women’s bathhouse social event:

Mr. Clark can feel however he wants. He can make conspiracy theories about people who are trans (or people he thinks could be trans). What’s not OK is whenever cis people quietly let him dehumanize trans people’s lives and trivialize the barriers they face without holding him responsible for the social cost of his intolerance.

photo: erlogan

When Mr. Clark is openly cissexist or transinvidic*, it comes with a social price. His behaviour cultivates a climate of social hostility for everyone who has this intersectional experience. As his animus for trans people is usually reserved for women (and their bodies), he adds to a misogyny which cuts across women of every intersection.

Trans women may have to put up with his abuse directly, but when we turn a blind eye to his transmisogyny, we are helping along the culture of misogyny that reduces both trans and cis women to our containers — our bodies. It’s a culture which regulates us, our legitimacy, and our subjectiveness as women based on the particular conditions of our containers.

(* “Transinvidia” is an expression of discontent, resentment, and/or envy of people who are trans. It maliciously regards and begrudges the reality of trans people’s lives. It’s different from “transphobia”, because the feelings aren’t rooted in fear.)

Mr. Clark is also capable of expressing animus toward trans people who are dead. On the passing of a 519 community centre advocate, a trans man named Kyle Scanlon:

There are a few cis people who don’t need any persuading to stand up for the well-being of trans people. These aren’t the cis people I wish to reach. The problem is that when other cis people aren’t speaking out against antisocial behaviour like Mr. Clark’s, it helps to produce two problems.

First, whenever you brush aside Mr. Clark’s behaviour with “oh, that’s just Joe being Joe again,” you are tacitly enabling his asocial hostility. He needs to understand that while he may think or feel however he wishes, there’s still a social propriety to which he must abide if he wants to participate.

Second, while Mr. Clark’s cissexist remarks may not affect you personally, they are affecting the trans person right nearby you. She feels it. She just can’t say much, because it may put her into harm’s way. If being trans wasn’t such a big deal to some cis people, then no such harm would lurk.

(Which trans person? You don’t see a trans person? That’s OK. It’s common for trans people to go unnoticed by cis people. Trans people, just like cis people, don’t have a prescribed appearance, history, sexuality, or narrative. We’re no less diverse than cis people. There’s just fewer of us in number.)

Here, Mr. Clark expresses his entitlement for being a man who is white, cis, and gay. This is not unheard of among men who share his intersectional experiences. It bothers him that his idealized vision is indeterminately tarnished by the messy diversity of people’s social experiences and their own needs. He waxes for a purity the way an elder on the porch yearns for a return to the traditional values “when things were better.” What Mr. Clark wants is a social conservatism as it befits his own experiences — and at the expense of everyone whose intersectional life experiences interfere with his vision.

I can see that Mr. Clark really doesn’t like the descriptive word “cis.” His desire to have his own experiences described as something other than cis is no longer being honoured by everyone. It’s because the word “cis” is as bothersome to him as “heterosexual” was to some heterosexual people a generation ago.

But both are meaningful. Each description helps bring to light the ubiquity of intersectional experiences which are manifest by the social privileges afforded when you are heterosexual and/or cis. Prior to, such privileges were called the “default” and “normal.” This shaped the way we saw things around us. If you weren’t “normal,” then you were “deviant.”

This is why social normativities like heteronormativity and cisnormativity are very real. So is homonormativity, which has a unique history. Mr. Clark advocates for a homonormativity. Like heteronormativity, it supports the continuance of a cisnormativity.

Whenever there’s a social normativity, anyone who is placed outside of those normative margins won’t experience a social benefit. Normativity can live on as a social commodity with an artificial scarcity worth conserving and controlling by anyone who benefits from it.

It’s as if a few people who are cis, heterosexual, or both, now feel uncomfortable. It’s as if they’ve lost something. They have, sort of: they’ve lost the privilege to dodge critical scrutiny, now that there’s a way to describe their experiences without using troublesome words like “normal.” They’ve lost the privilege of treating people who lack their own intersectional privilege as objects.

Mr. Clark has protested how his experiences of being cis have been described as cis. Yet he shows no compunction when prescribing — that is, to label as objects — people who are trans as “transgenders” (a thing), “transgenderists” (a hobby), and even “the transgendered” (a terrible affliction):

No one can stop Mr. Clark from denying the humanity of people who are trans, even after they’re dead. Misogynists do this to women and femininity. Xenophobic people do this to people whose cultural experiences aren’t contained neatly in a nationalist, racist box. Homophobic people do this to people who are believed to be anything but heterosexual — irrespective if the subject is cis or trans.

Mr. Clark also cannot expect to have it both ways. He cannot prescribe the experiences of a very diverse population and then proscribe others from describing his own experiences (and how he uses his intersectional privilege to do the prescribing).

Now that describing the experience of being cis is possible, it is also possible to redress social orders which appraise cis life experiences over trans life experiences. Mr. Clark knows this. It’s clear he doesn’t want that discussion to happen, because as it does, it uncovers how his behaviour toward trans people is disruptive, hostile, and really crude.

When we dispense with the humanity of others, we scrape away a little more of our own humanity. We don’t have to like everyone else. We don’t have to agree with everyone else. But we must learn to respect that people deserve the agency of their humanity. They deserve being treated as a subject. They deserve that their intersectional experiences of personhood are respected — especially by people who don’t share them.

Shaming takes away from facing down Mr. Clark constructively. The troubling with shaming was written about once by a local writer named David Topping. There might still be a way to use your tumblr to create positive change, though.

Once upon a time, Klan members were respected as upstanding citizens for what they did during the daytime when their white capes and hoods were folded and hidden away. Social knowledge slowly caught up to them and slowly drove them into hiding. It took a lot of work from a lot of advocates. It took years. But that knowledge shaped their worldview into a socially undesirable deviance.

That’s sort of what the Xtra.ca unmanaged comment section has become: cissexist, misogynistic, and xenophobic comments like those posted there are words simply not strong enough to be uttered, in the flesh, before the general public. Comments like the kind posted by Mr. Clark on Xtra are acts of drive-by cowardice. The trouble is they still embody what a dwindling number of people still believe about women (and men) who are trans. They will take this to their old, embittered graves.

Ignorance is a demon. You can’t shake hands with the devil and say you’re only kidding. Eventually those handshakes will catch up.

As it sinks in with more people in Toronto how cissexism is socially disruptive and toxic to a lot of vulnerable people, Mr. Clark will face a jury of his own cis peers on the merits of his many remarks — the cissexist ones, the xenophobic ones, and the misogynistic ones.

Use your tumblr to share knowledge, Meg. Make sure the people you know understand what Mr. Clark and his like-minded fellows are. Let that knowledge force them to scurry into darker, more isolated places.

How to make him pay: do your intel. What groups is he a part of? Who does he work for or with? Who explicitly endorses him? In short, who is he associated with who would be shocked by his actions?

Then go to *them*. Ask them if they are aware of his statements. (“Did you know your employee is posting these things under his real name in his spare time?”) Request a public explanation, apology, or disavowal. Explain that you belong to a community he targets. If they don’t back off from him, shame *them*. “Such-and-such Association claims to support the trans community, but refuses to distance themselves from noted transphobe Joe Clark” or whatever.

If you can’t find these groups or people…that should tell you something about his standing in the community.

It’s not just transphobia, and it’s not just Toronto. The accessibility and web design communities as a whole, and especially the Zeldman-AListApart empire that continues to validate him, need to publicly repudiate Joe Clark for his misogyny.

If he said the things about black people that he said about women, people would be howling for his blood. He is way, way out of bounds and it is long past time that he is held to account. We need to hurt him financially and professionally so he knows what the hurt he so thoughtlessly dispenses feels like.

I have to say after having my run-ins with him, that the only thing that will make him go away is ignoring him. I know that is really hard and I’ve had my freak outs. There is some sort of mental illness going on. The moment I stopped responding he ceased to write letters to Xtra or my blog anymore. Unfortunately we can’t stop people from being hateful. He feeds off of people negatively reacting. I’ve never come across anyone who seems to love to be hated. So do the opposite, don’t do give him the attention is desperately craves.

Brilliant post! I have been in many fights with Joe Clarke and think we all have a responsibility to call these fuckers out. I don’t see it as giving him attention,I see it as giving our community members respect and attention. Thank you for this post!!